Exploring the Social Nature of Neonate Behaviour

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Social interactions are a critical part of human society, and evidence suggests that our abilities to reason about social interactions and behaviours are present early on in life. Even prior to their first birthdays, infants show remarkable social cognition, including the ability to understand others’ goals (Woodward, 1998) and needs (Köster et al., 2016), and to evaluate others’ actions based on mental states (Hamlin et al., 2013). Young children also engage in a range of prosocial acts including sharing, helping, and empathic response (Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011; Svetlova et al., 2010; Warneken & Tomasello, 2007). Moreover, a large body of research suggests that the origins of mature forms of social cognition and behaviour can be evidenced at birth. For instance, newborns become distressed at the cries of another neonate (Dondi et al., 1999; Sagi & Hoffman, 1976; Simner, 1971), they show preferences for face-like over non-face configurations (Bedford et al., 2015; Goren et al., 1975; Johnson et al., 2005; 2015), and they imitate simple gestures (Meltzoff & Moore, 1983;1992; Nagy et al., 2013). However, recent failures to replicate and methodological criticisms question the inferences that have been made about neonates’ aptitude for social interaction based on previous results (Buiatti et al., 2019; Heyes, 2016; 2018; Oostenbroek et al., 2016; Ruffman et al., 2017). In other words, it’s unclear to what extent these behaviors actually represent rudimentary forms of social cognition.

We are in the process of gathering longitudinal data on 500 participants, a project that follows infants’ social and moral development from birth to age 3. Per our pre-registration, the study we propose here will use a subsample of data (minimum N = 32 per condition) collected during the first phase of this project to compare neonates’ (0 - 5 weeks) responses across three classic measures of “social” behaviour: imitation (frequency and duration of gestures matching those produced by a live model; Meltzoff & Moore, 1989; 1992), distress contagion (latency to cry in response to a recording of another newborn crying; Sagi & Hoffman, 1976), and preference for faces (degree to which neonates turn head and eyes to track a face-like versus non-face like stimuli; Goren et al., 1975). If all three measures capture social behaviour in neonates, we would expect to see concurrent associations among them. Thus, we predict positive medium-level correlations among neonate responses on these tasks. Further, past work has suggested that neonate social competencies predict later sociomoral behaviours (eg. Bedford et al., 2015; Georgio et al., 2016); therefore, we will also explore predictive relationships among variables through a series of linear regression analyses. Data collection is ongoing and we are currently processing data from the first 50 participants; however will continue to add participants to our sample for the analyses proposed here until February, 2021. Through this study, we will contribute to our interpretation of neonates’ responses on a number of classic measures that presume to measure social behaviours. This is a vital preliminary step in mapping the earliest origins of social and moral cognition, a primary objective of the affiliated longitudinal project.

Authors

• Raechel Drew, University of British Columbia (UBC)
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Grabert, University of British Columbia (UBC)
  Non-Presenting Author

• J. Kiley Hamlin, University of British Columbia (UBC)
  Non-Presenting Author